40 top venture capital firms sent a scathing warning in the form of a letter on Thursday addressing a bill that was recently passed in the Senate regarding Internet piracy and counterfeit goods.

Senator from Oregon (D) Ron Wyden immediately put a hold on the bill and similar legislation has not been introduced in the house.

The bill will remain in a sort of congressional limbo, but it is so destructive to future investment in innovative Internet startups that top tier VCs felt the need to speak out with one voice in opposition to the very concept of such overreaching legislation.

I have never met anyone who left his or her job -- whether fired or voluntarily -- who started his or her own business and regretted it. What these people always regret is not having done it sooner. This includes people who eventually failed and had to go back to work for someone else.

So are you ready to be an entrepreneur? Do you have the right stuff? Before you take the plunge, take this test:

Do you need a new idea? New ideas are wonderful if you have them. But your best chance of success is working hard, using established values and ideas if necessary.

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and Economic Development, Job Creation, Commerce and Industry Committee Chair Robin Schimminger announced the approval of legislation that would provide $55.4 million in federal funds available through the State Small Business Credit Initiative to the Innovate NY Fund, the New York State Capital Access Program (CAP) and the Bonding Guarantee Assistance Program.

A key component of the bill (A.8452/Schimminger) would establish the "Innovate NY Fund," a new economic development program focused on investing in emerging industries that will fuel economic growth in New York State.

One of the most common complaints I hear from entrepreneurs is that they are overwhelmed by the workload and stress of starting their company. Then there are the additional challenges of balancing the demands of family and friends. Having too much on your plate can turn your dream into a nightmare.

Some people will tell you to just get a bigger plate, meaning hire some help. But with the pressures of the economy, and limited access to outside funding, we all know this isn’t always possible or appropriate. I recommend the opposite, or getting things off your plate that shouldn’t be there in the first place.

In reality, many entrepreneurs are their own worst enemy, trying to do everything, working inefficiently, and imagining things that need doing which will never happen. Here are some tips on how to look at work, make some hard decisions, and keep your health and sanity:

• Maintain a big picture perspective. It’s easy to be overwhelmed by day-to-day details, to the degree that they all seem like big items, driving up your imagined workload. Take a few minutes each day to reflect on your real goals, and eliminate items which don’t relate.

I came across two very interesting posts today in which execs at highly rated marketing software company Hubspot write glowingly about two of their investors, Sequoia Capital and Google Ventures.  One post is about why Sequoia is such a successful VC, and the other asks the questions Will Google Ventures disrupt venture capital?

In the case of Sequoia there are two main reasons given why they are successful.  The first is that past success begets future success and they have a long history of being at the top of the VC game.  That history brings them great brand, know how from experience of working with great companies and access to great talent from those companies.  The second reason is strong execution from the existing Sequoia team – they don’t rest on their laurels, but rather work hard, are aggressive but reasonable, and are agile in their working practices.

What I’ve learned the last 10 years of working with entrepreneurial small businesses is that this savvy group of marketers cares about three things: getting more customers, increasing sales and saving time.

Small businesses tend to focus most, if not all, of their marketing and sales resources on closing hot leads — which means the not-ready-to-buy-yet leads end up getting thrown out with yesterday’s garbage.

This “get more customers now” mentality, combined with a lack of time and resources, hurts small businesses and often causes some serious inefficiency in the marketing and sales funnel.

Many questions invariably arise throughout the process of incorporating or forming an LLC for your business. By far, one of the most common questions is…where? And more often than not, the question is framed as, “Should I incorporate in Delaware or Nevada?”

These two states are hot choices for incorporation, and for good reason. Many larger corporations choose Delaware because it offers some of the most developed, flexible and pro-business statutes in the country. And Nevada is increasingly becoming a popular choice for businesses due to its low filing fees, as well as the lack of state corporate income, franchise and personal income taxes.

I had a board update call recently that inspired me to write the first of my Reinventing the Board Meeting posts.

The call was for a company that is doing great, is extremely well managed, and extraordinarily transparent. Two days before the call a very detailed update package was sent around to the board. It covered the operating characteristics of the business extensively and in a format that is consistent with all of the other reports. It was clear and unambiguous.

The company does a very nice job with the board update call. They don’t force the board to sit through a page by page discussion of the package. Instead, there’s a short overview for each section followed by any Q&A that board members have. This is a pretty good approach. After about an hour of this we spent another 30 minutes on a handful of governance and board related issues. Overall, the call lasted two hours.

With the nation's economic concerns mounting, President Obama is again turning to its research universities for help.

In a speech set for Friday morning at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, the president plans to announce a $500-million endeavor through which universities and companies will be asked to develop innovations in manufacturing with the goal of expanding domestic employment.

The idea is based on recommendations from the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, an advisory group of scientists and engineers.

Companies can strengthen their computer networks against hacking attacks and data breaches, but their defenses won't work as well if employees are circumventing them. Yet companies often unintentionally inspire just such behavior by limiting how much e-mail their employees can send, receive, and store.

That's because employees who face tight limits on the size of their mailboxes tend to merely work around the restrictions. For instance, they might send and receive files through their personal Web mail accounts or through Web file-transfer sites. Using the public Internet could make it more likely for the information to be stolen, and there are consequences beyond hacking, too: once data leaves a company's control, it can be harder to restore it after a disaster or to find it during audits or lawsuits.

When hackers breached the servers of Sony Pictures in June, they cast a harsh light on one of the Web's most bedeviling security problems: passwords. After finding that 1 million user passwords for three Sony sites were stored without encryption, the intruders posted them online for anyone to see.

Security researcher Troy Hunt pored over the file and found that half of the passwords could be considered weak because they had a low degree of randomness—they had only lowercase letters, only uppercase letters or only numbers. More than a third of the passwords could have been found in a dictionary and easily guessed by a password cracker, a tool that quickly tries different combinations of secret words. Half of the passwords were seven characters or less. Finally, the researcher found 90 e-mail accounts that had also shown up in another leaked password file, from Gawker.com, and discovered that about two-thirds of those users had the same password at both sites. "It indicates to me that this was a normal practice for people to plug in the same password into their accounts," says Hunt, a software architect who studies security.

Australia could always use more angel investors, says Dean McEvoy, co-founder of the wildly successful group-buying site Spreets.

“Doing a startup in Australia is kind of like growing a plant in a dark cupboard. It’s really bloody hard,” McEvoy said in a talk presented at VIVID Creative Sydney.

Hard, but hardly impossible, he notes. If good ideas or sharp entrepreneurs get decent exposure, the financial backing is there to be had — even if it comes from overseas. And international investors are paying more attention; McEvoy pointed to Aussie enterprise 99Designs as an example of homegrown business that has received significant looks from overseas.

As a follow up to yesterday's post on this topic, here's another chart from Mark Suster:

So using the math I laid out yesterday (roughly 1,000 startups funded each year by VCs), this means that on average between 1% and 3% of venture funded startups get to an IPO.

To recap, 1-3% get to an IPO and 5-10% get to an M&A exit over $100mm. So 85-95% of all venture backed startups will either fail or exit below $100mm.

GE and its funding partners will invest $63 million in 10 innovative home energy technology companies.

The investment is the second round of funding as part of the $200 million “GE ecomagination Challenge” to find better ways to use, manage and conserve energy. The second phase, “Powering Your Home,” was launched in January.

So far, GE and its partners have invested or committed to invest $134 million in the home energy and power grid technology developers announced as winners of its Innovation Challenge. The challenge has also produced 22 new commercial partnerships and resulted in the acquisition of FMC-Tech, a smart-grid technology company spotlighted during the first phase.

The press is regularly (and unfairly) criticised for seeking out bad news. In my experience bad news comes to the press. That's because people are at their wits end having failed through official channels to stop unfairness, abuse, or just incompetence.

Conversely, when you come across good news it's always surprised me how reluctant people can be - they too often want publicity, but "not just now".

This new blog is a catalyst for change. To do that it actively seeks out examples of success - of how innovators have overcome generic barriers and succeeded in getting their innovation, especially cutting edge innovation, into large organisations and government. This will mean calling some bluffs but the success this blog roots out will be used to promote change.

Private wealth managers McNally Capital and Black Coral Capital, which co-founded the syndicate last June, say the participating families, with a collective net worth topping $30bn, are sophisticated and experienced investors in the sector, having pumped more than $1.2bn into private cleantech businesses from seed capital to project finance.

They also posses direct experience in wind and solar development, solar technology and real estate ownership.

The syndicate is looking for investments in solar, energy efficiency, storage, project development, green chemistry, water, wind, biofuels and biomass, recycling and geothermal.

George Weiss has seen around 80 of his inventions fail, but at 84 years old he has finally hit gold.

Dabble is a word game that requires fast thinking, and is a lot of fun. It is now found in 42 stores across the country, and recently won the 2011 Game of the Year Award from Creative Child Magazine, reports NY Daily News.

“If you can spell you can play,” says Weiss, sitting in the basement of the home he has lived in for 45 years. “The idea just came to me three years ago and I started cutting up plastic tiles and creating a five-tiered rack for them to rest on.”

A new online referral system meant to help Michigan entrepreneurs start or build their businesses launches Friday.

After several years of development, the nonprofit Matching Opportunities and Resources for Entrepreneurs — or MORE — Program plans to go live with the InsYght system, which gets to know the people it's helping through an online questionnaire. InsYght will operate initially through links on the websites of three Southeast Michigan organizations: Brightmoor Alliance, TechTown in Detroit and Troy-based Walsh College.

Once the system collects information to form a profile on each user, it prescribes the next steps that a person or company can take to meet goals and connects the user to specific resources and contact people who can help.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA--(Marketwire - Jun 23, 2011) - Silicon Valley welcomed the first ever technology accelerator for minority-led start-ups, NewME Accelerator. NewME's select participants commenced their first class on June 16 and will participate in this program throughout the summer. The start-up founders are based in a shared house in Mountain View, Calif. and are utilizing co-working space at Citizen Space in San Francisco.

This program gives the founders a unique opportunity to learn from key industry leaders during private group dinners and one-on-one mentorship. The founders will leverage this once-in-a-lifetime access, and being in the epicenter of Silicon Valley's culture, for nine weeks to take their ventures to the next level. Speakers and mentors will include representatives from successful start-ups such as Tagged, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Zynga Games. The accelerator concludes with a demo day at Kapor Capital August 2nd where founders will pitch their products to various investors and members of the start-up community.

Let’s face it. We ALL have a great idea that we think could make money. Some of us have even taken the time to do research, perfect the idea, draft a business plan, get funding, and even make it market. What the majority of people who don’t follow through with their ideas attribute their lack of action to is the amount of time it takes to go from an idea to a minimal viable product (MVP).

As a result, MANY great ideas die from the hands of time. One of the sole purposes behind a startup accelerator program is to round up people with great ideas with those who have the means to support those ideas.

Most startup accelerators (or incubators) focus primarily around software/technology ideas and are willing to invest the time and the money to help people with dreams of being the next Microsoft, Apple, or Google or Facebook. The accelerator programs bring in speakers and mentors to encourage participants and serve as examples of what can be accomplished. They provide networking opportunities for the participants to possibly spread the word about your idea to the rest of the industry. Many well-known investors and venture capitalists frequent or even monetarily support startup accelerator programs in hopes to find and (finance) the next big thing.